of 16mm microfilm, which are the only source of many Air Force individual flight records from 1911 to 1974, have developed red measles-like spots, which means NARA now needs to make backup copies. Some 1,393 reels of 16mm microfilm containing the much used Veterans Administration Master Index Card File for World Wars I and II are losing image quality. Approximately 99,000 cubic feet of records of Navy enlisted personnel between 1885 and 1947 are cracking at their folds and falling apart from the effects of cheap, acidic paper.

Saving these records requires appropriate housing, special treatment, and in some cases reformatting of record material; solutions that we are energetically pursuing within the limitations of current re

sources.

I couldn't help thinking about the needs of these records after I saw the highly praised film Saving Private Ryan. In it, American commanders in World War II realize that three of the four sons from one family have been killed, and the fourth is somewhere in Normandy. They order a search for him so that his family can have at least one son safe at home. I was a child during World War II, but I did not learn of its impact on families in my community of Skolan, Kansas, until much later. The military service records in NARA's holdings today help thousands of Private Ryans and their families. Enabling the National Archives and Records Administration to care for service records is one of the ways in which the nation recognizes the achievements of our service people and their sacrifices.

the national state had hardly gone away, the Pension Bureau was the only national bureaucracy with which ordinary Americans-especially those living outside the cities-had much truck.

But even when they are thirty years past, major cataclysms such as the Civil War are never far below the surface. And when the dead suddenly walk again among the living, a certain amount of historical reckoning must be expected to follow. In this essay, I will tell the story of the stranger-William Newby to his friends and neighbors, Daniel Benton to the federal government-as it unfolded between 1891 and 1898. In the process, I will suggest some ways in which his tale-which may at first seem more like a loose end of the Civil War than a window to its legacy-tells us interesting things about the war's long shadow over the Gilded Age. In particular, it points up conflicts between

tottering gait and a rambling way of talking that made his conversation one long stream of self-interruptions. But as they spoke, Lay became convinced that the stranger was none other than William Newby, an old comrade from the Fortieth Regiment of Illinois Volunteers who had been reported killed at the Battle of Shiloh twenty-nine years earlier.

On the surface, Newby's return seemed highly unlikely. Lay himself remembered seeing Newby shot in the head at Shiloh; other veterans of the regiment remembered burying him on the battlefield. Newby's wife, Fereby, had long since accepted a widow's pension from the federal government and moved to Texas, where one of the Newby sons had a farm. Still, after three other veterans of the Fortieth Illinois who lived nearby interviewed the man and concurred that he was Newby,

took the man to see his uncles, Presley and Whaley Newby. The man's recollections were disjointed; in fact, he seemed to be somewhat feeble-minded. He told of being wounded in the head at Shiloh, spending time in the notorious Confederate prison at Andersonville, and wandering more or less insane from prison to poorhouse since then. At the farm, Ki later testified, friends and family members questioned the man about long-ago matters of which only William Newby could have known. He located his father's grave, recalled the details of fistfights and log-rafting trips, and pointed out the site of an old cistern and a cider trough that even family members had long forgotten. He displayed scars from old fights and farm accidents. "Hundreds of little tests of this kind have been applied, and usually he remembers the events perfectly," reported the Wayne County Record. "He does not, however, remember persons at all. He does not remember that he was married." Some visitors to the farm also were suspicious of the dark-haired stranger because they remembered Newby as lighthaired.3

There was only one way to settle the matter, and on April 21, Dr. R. H. Mariclethe Newbys' family physician, and the man who in 1862 had written from Shiloh to inform Fereby that her husband was dead-was delegated to write her once again:

"[N]ot until I had visited him the third time could I be reconciled that he was the man that I supposed I had helped to bury over 29 years ago, although evidence of his identity was preponderous. Come home and see him and be convinced that your friend[s] have been wireing and writing you strait [sic] goods. . . . Every thing points to proofs which are undeniable, but there is a great change in his looks of course, but according to his statement he has been in those prison dens which human tongue cannot describe and after the close of the war was held or prohibited from coming home to keep him from getting a pension and was compelled under the lash to vote the Rebel ticket. No wonder the [sic] there is Such a change in his looks."

Meanwhile, Newby's new friends urged him to apply for a federal veteran's pension, which he did on April 6.1

When Newby's pension claim reached Washington on April 17, it immediately attracted official attention, for it was large. Newby had never been mustered out of the army. Thus, if he could establish his identity to the satisfaction of the Pension Bureau, he could claim not only a monthly disability pension for the rest of his life, but almost thirty years of back pay-a sum approaching ten thousand dollars at a time when an annual income of one thousand dollars placed a man securely in the local upper class." The incentive to fraud was obvious.

Moreover, in the political climate of 1891, pension fraud was a charged issue. Having gained election in 1888 on the platform that it was “no time to be weighing the claims of old soldiers with apothecary's scales," President Benjamin Harrison had subsequently presided over three years of largesse, administered by partisan commissioners of pensions: first James Tanner, who had openly declared "God help the surplus" and had been sacked after six months, then Green Berry Raum, a corrupt Republican ex-congressman from southern Illinois who held office at the time Newby's application arrived in 1891. Democrats, as they had in 1888, were preparing for the 1892 elections by howling about pension fraud under the Republicans. Thus when Newby reappeared, local Democratic papers were not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. "Excitement is running high over the appearance of a man claiming the name of William Newby," remarked the Democratic Carmi Courier on April 16; "The gentleman is evidently crazy or a fraud."

However, when Fereby Newby arrived in Mill Shoals on April 24 and immediately identified the claimant as her long-lost husband, attitudes changed. "Can we who have never experienced such entertain even a faint idea of the rapturous joy felt by this long separated husband and wife," gushed

Pension fraud was a beated topic in 1891. James Tanner declared "God help the surplus" and survived only six months as commissioner of pensions.

the local correspondent of the Republican Wayne County Press. "[O]n this occasion we think the joy must be as nearly akin to that felt when families are reunited in heaven as anything earthly can be." Hundreds of well-wishers visited the Newby homestead. James Files, a brother-in-law, threw him a birthday party. The Fairfield Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) post invited him to its meeting, where he "told a well connected story, and at times his mind showed flashes of intelligence and humor that were surprising to his hearers." Said the Democratic Wayne County Record: "A few still claim to doubt his identity, but his wife says there is no doubt about the matter."" Even the special examiner sent by the Bureau of Pensions, Edward D. Elliott, told his superiors after interviewing Fereby that he was inclined to believe her. By June 1892, rumors were rife locally that the government had already granted Newby his pension.'

8

All was not well, however, in the camp of the Newby adherents. In August 1892 Presley Newby changed his mind and announced that he believed his "brother" to be a fraud. Pension Commissioner Raum met the claimant on a visit to nearby

Enfield in late autumn and was inclined to be sympathetic ("The woman recognized and received him, when he returned some two years ago, as her husband and he is now living with her," he noted). But Raum was feeling the heat of an election-year corruption investigation in Washington that would soon lead to his resignation. He appointed a second special examiner, A. A. Holmes, to look into the case.10

After interviewing the alleged Newby and dozens of other witnesses in January and February 1893, Holmes concluded that the man was a fraud. Dr. Maricle and Carroll Newby, another brother, now rejected the stranger's claim; Whaley Newby, while still accepting it, added that "there are some things which do not satisfy him fully." Holmes theorized that the impostor had met the elderly Carroll Newby in early 1891, when both were inmates of the poorhouse at Mt. Vernon, Illinois, and garnered enough information to pass initially as William Newby. He then entered into a conspiracy with Ki, Fereby, and other members of the Newby family, who filled him in on the details of William's life:

When one approaches him and tries to find out something about his personal history which is vital, he then falls back into ignorance and does not know because his mind is not right, which is a convenient retreat. He is thoroughly posted as to the necessities of his case, and he and the family of Wm. Newby propose to get a pension if it can be had.

Still, Holmes thought another examiner should look into the case and re-interview Fereby Newby. "I do not want my opinion to do this poor fellow any injustice, for I feel sorry for him," Holmes wrote."

In the meantime, however, the political situation had changed drastically. The victory of Grover Cleveland in the 1892 elections brought to Washington a Democratic administration pledged to root out fraud in the nation's pension system. Within two